After more than 15 years of working as a professional theatre director and producer, I discovered my love of teaching in 2011 when invited to participate in the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival. In the company of young artists, my own passion for the theatre was reinvigorated, and my ideas about its importance to society clarified and refined. Beyond simple entertainment, I began to see theatre as a means to build community, to open minds, and to contribute to positive societal change. I carry these ideas with me into the classroom and studio, as well as in my own continuing creative work.
My general approach to teaching is partly inspired by an assertion from theatre director and teacher Anne Bogart, who writes in her book A Director Prepares that “…you cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.” While she is referring primarily to theatre directing, I have adopted this same philosophy as a core tenet of my teaching. Rather than attempting to “create results,” I focus on creating conditions under which learning can happen.
Specifically, I structure theatre classes at the intersection of theory and practice. In Acting classes, for example, I begin each week by studying the work of a foundational thinker, such as Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner, Adler, Hagen, and Chekhov, or with an examination of a more recent approach, such as Viewpoints, Suzuki, Margolis Method, or the Hendricks Method. I then explore how those theories are put into practice through exercises and scene work.